December 13, 2010

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Christopher Hill once said of Holbrooke,“He often works on the music before he gets to the words, creating an atmosphere and a sense of what are we dealing with—are we dealing with a sad song, or what? Right now, Richard Holbrooke is getting a sense of the issues, the people. Eventually, the music will shift from Vietnam to the Balkans. And if he gets to a negotiation it will be realistic.” When I repeated Hill’s remark to Holbrooke on the plane, he took out a pen, and on a napkin he wrote down “INSTITUTION BUILDING.” He drew a line under it, and below the line he wrote “DIP PHASE.” “Things are not sequential,” Holbrooke said. “They have to be parallel processes.” He acknowledged that no Dayton would come at the end of the diplomatic phase. In both Vietnam and the Balkans, he said, “there was always a fixed adversary, with whom you could talk even while fighting.” This time, the enemy had no capital, no government. It was very hard to imagine a cast of characters, in suits and uniforms and turbans, seated around a table, preparing to end the Af-Pak war, with Holbrooke standing over them, smiling the smile that told you he had won.

In our conversations, Holbrooke admitted that much of his new job had “a back-to-the-future quality,” but he was wary of the subject of Vietnam, as if he smelled a trap. On the flight home, exasperated with my questions about his earlier life, he wrote out and handed to me a short account of the main reasons for America’s failure in Vietnam, which concluded, “The mission itself was based on a profound misreading, by five presidents and their advisors, of the strategic importance of Vietnam to the U.S.”

Even so, Holbrooke couldn’t stop invoking the war of his youth. From Kabul, he called the journalist Stanley Karnow, an old friend, and put him on the phone with General McChrystal to discuss the lessons of Vietnam. He mentioned Vietnam in staff meetings in Washington, and he brought it up in a speech to American Embassy personnel on my last day in Kabul: “Having been in similar circumstances earlier in my career, in another war—as they say, in a distant galaxy and another time—I know what it’s like to be out here in difficult conditions without your family.” When he called for the Embassy to encourage spouses to come live in Kabul, despite the danger, Holbrooke was unconsciously repeating an idea that he had put forth in a memo in 1966....

Holbrooke must know that there will be no American victory in this war; he can only try to forestall potential disaster. But if he considers success unlikely, or even questions the premise of the war, he has kept it to himself. “Americans cannot think of a situation where, in the face of attacks by Al Qaeda, they would give up, they would say, ‘The hell with it, we have to leave,’ ” he told me. “It’s just not an acceptable course of action.” It was as if, for Holbrooke, the year would always be 1962, his career at its beginning. He said, “I still believe in the possibility of the United States, with all its will and all its strength, and I don’t just mean military, persevering against any challenge. I still believe in that.”

His death was a true shock to those who know him, in part because he was defined by defying the odds. President Obama had said just before he died, "Tonight we’re all praying for Richard’s recovery… He is a tough son of a gun so we are confident that as hard as this is, he is going to be putting up a tremendous fight.”

Hillary Clinton:

Tonight America has lost one of its fiercest champions and most dedicated public servants. Richard Holbrooke served the country he loved for nearly half a century, representing the United States in far-flung war-zones and high-level peace talks, always with distinctive brilliance and unmatched determination. He was one of a kind -- a true statesman -- and that makes his passing all the more painful.

From his early days in Vietnam to his historic role bringing peace to the Balkans to his last mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard helped shape our history, manage our perilous present, and secure our future. He was the consummate diplomat, able to stare down dictators and stand up for America's interests and values even under the most difficult circumstances. He served at every level of the Foreign Service and beyond, helping mentor generations of talented officers and future ambassadors. Few people have ever left a larger mark on the State Department or our country. From Southeast Asia to post-Cold War Europe and around the globe, people have a better chance of a peaceful future because of Richard’s lifetime of service.

I had the privilege to know Richard for many years and to call him a friend, colleague and confidante. As Secretary of State, I have counted on his advice and relied on his leadership. This is a sad day for me, for the State Department and for the United States of America.

True to form, Richard was a fighter to the end. His doctors marveled at his strength and his willpower, but to his friends, that was just Richard being Richard....

John Kerry:

This awful news is almost incomprehensible, not least of all because I cannot imagine Richard Holbrooke in anything but a state of perpetual motion. He was always working. He was always a man on a mission, the toughest mission, and that mission was waging peace through tough as nails, never quit diplomacy - and Richard's life’s work saved tens of thousands of lives.

We loved his energy, we loved his resolve – that’s who Richard was, and he died giving everything he had to one last difficult mission for the country he loved. It is almost a bittersweet bookend that a career of public service that began trying to save a war gone wrong, now ends with a valiant effort to keep another war from going wrong....

Wherever chaos and violence threatened American interests and human lives for nearly a half century, wherever there was a need for courage and insight, Richard Holbrooke showed up for duty. He spent his formative years as a young foreign service officer in Vietnam, where he worked in the Mekong Delta and then on the staffs of two American ambassadors, Maxwell Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge. Given the storied expanse of his career, people sometimes forget that Richard wrote a volume of the Pentagon Papers, the seminal work that helped turn the course of the Vietnam War. As with all of us who served in Vietnam, Richard’s experience there informed his every judgment, and instilled in him a lifelong commitment to work to ensure that peace and diplomacy prevailed over war.

Richard never shied from the tough assignments, and he undertook his last one with the same determination that enabled him to - through sheer will - broker the peace agreement among the warring factions in Bosnia that resulted in the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. He will always be remembered as a warrior for peace.

At the moment I'm simply shocked, despite news that he had been critically ill, because Holbrooke is -- "was" -- a figure who radiated so much energy, ambition, curiosity, planning, and all-directions activity at all times that it is hard to imagine him ever at rest.

[H]e was not the sort of person who dies, or at least dies before he's finished with what he needed to finish.There was too much will inside him to achieve, and he had not yet achieved what he needed to achieve.... It always struck me that Holbrooke, with his titanic ego, his magnetism and his brute intelligence -- and also his conniving, man-of-the-bazaar qualities so unusual in an American -- would be the only American who could birth a Palestinian state and bring peace to the Middle East.

Holbrooke maintained an unusual stature in the diplomatic field and represented his country with deep knowledge of the international arena. His years of experience represent a huge loss. The nation has lost a most unique or exceptional patriot. I am saddened by this lose and my thoughts are with his family.

I feel for the family, but this guy is and was everything that is wrong with US foreign policy. The state department is full up with this type of US comes last mentality. And yeah, we were on the wrong side of the Bosnian thing.

The last words of Richard Holbrooke, President Obama's chief envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, before he was sedated for surgery on Friday:
"You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan."
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/12/quote-day-ending-war